Asking
questions to establish prior knowledge
By starting your lesson
with some questions to students, you can probe to establish what students already
know about the topic that you plan to cover and adjust your teaching in the
lesson accordingly. Alternatively, you could end a lesson with questions to students
which will help you determine the content and level of the following lesson;
this way you will have more time to prepare and adjust your lesson in
accordance with the students’ prior knowledge.
Asking different types of
questions gives you a chance to check the depth of your students’ understanding
of a topic. A useful tool for defining questions is Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom,
1984), in which questions are categorised according to
various levels of abstraction typically investigated during academic studies.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
The various types of questions that we use
with our students can be categorized in many ways, but probably the
most often cited taxonomy is Bloom’s. Bloom based his taxonomy on the types of tasks most often
called for in academic settings.
|
1.
Knowledge Questions: recall and recognition: major ideas, dates, names,
places, etc.
|
|
2. Comprehension
Questions: understanding, interpreting
facts, translating knowledge, comparing and contrasting ·
Key words: summarize, contrast, explain, predict, state in your own
words, demonstrate, discuss, show, give an example, select the best
definition, which statements support, infer, etc. |
|
3.
Application Questions: use information, solve
problems, apply information to new situations ·
Key words: Calculate, illustrate, show, relate, what would
result, modify, judge the effects, tell what would happen,
complete, discover, examine, etc. |
|
4. Analysis Questions: finding patterns, parts, organization, components ·
Key words: Identify, analyze, connect, classify, arrange, order, what
does the author believe or assume, find the
inconsistencies, separate, compare, what conclusions, separate fact
and opinion, etc. |
|
5.
Synthesis Questions: creating new ideas
from old ones, generalizing from facts, relating elements or
knowledge in a new way,
predicting, drawing conclusions ·
Key words: Combine, develop, choose, state a rule, solve
the following, plan, formulate, rearrange, compose,
modify, generalize, propose an alternative, etc. |
|
6.
Evaluation Questions: discriminating between
ideas, making choices and defending them, assessing the value of
theories, verifying the value of the evidence, identifying
subjectivity ·
Key words: Assess, criticize, judge, recommend, convince, appraise,
what fallacies/inconsistencies appear, what is
more logical/better/appropriate/moral, rank, support, grade,
summarize, measure, discriminate, etc. |
table adapted from Ross (2007)
To find out the scope of
the students’ knowledge and understanding, it helps to ask questions from a
variety of levels. Ross (2007) makes some recommendations to teachers who opt to
use the questioning approach:
·
Allow sufficient
time for students to answer questions: the more complex the
question, the more time should be given.
·
If the students
don’t come up with an answer, don’t answer it yourself, but rephrase the
question. To help students increase their confidence in their responses, they
can be asked to discuss the question in pairs or small groups first. Teachers should give the message that it is
up to them to answer the questions.
·
Avoid asking the
students if they have any questions. Teachers are more likely to discover what the students know and
understand if the students are set the task of listing their own questions or
asked specific questions by the teacher about the topic to be covered.
·
Choose questions to
the students that fit in with the learning goals for the course or lesson and
help them to see the connections to what they already know.
References:
Bloom BS. 1984. Taxonomy of
educational objectives. Allyn and Bacon,
Ross C. 2007. Handbook for Teaching
Assistants. Institute for Teaching and Learning.
Suzy McAnsh,
Language Centre,